arXiv AI
The Life Cycle of a Massive Activation: Stochastic Birth, Weight-Decay-Driven Growth, and Competitive Consolidation
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arXiv AI
Aug 11
Dynamic gain neuromodulation attenuates the stability gap under joint training
arXiv:2507. 14056v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent work in continual learning has highlighted the stability gap -- a temporary performance drop on previously learned tasks when new ones are introduced.
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 23
A Spectral Theory of Grokking: Weight Decay induces Feature Learning
The paper presents a spectral theory explaining the phenomenon of grokking, where an initial fit to training data is followed by a delayed improvement in generalization. It shows that for homogeneous networks trained with squared loss and L₂ weight decay, residuals after memorization influence the neural tangent kernel (NTK) dynamics, leading to a transition from lazy to rich learning. The theory predicts that grokking timescales depend on the product of learning rate and weight decay, and that stronger decay can halt fitting, with empirical validation on modular addition tasks using MLPs and Transformers.
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 24
Thermodynamic Weight Decay: Exploring Grokking Acceleration via Attention Specific Heat
arXiv:2607. 20552v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Grokking -- the delayed generalization of neural networks long after they have memorized their training data -- wastes thousands of training epochs and is notoriously unpredictable.
arXiv AI
Jul 28
Scale Weight Decay and Train Better
arXiv:2607. 23777v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The discovery of scaling laws has motivated training neural networks on ever increasing quantities of data.
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5
Neural Collapse Dynamics: Depth, Activation, Regularisation, and Feature Norm Threshold
arXiv:2604. 00230v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Neural collapse (NC) -- the convergence of penultimate-layer features to a simplex equiangular tight frame -- is well understood at equilibrium, but the dynamics governing its onset remain poorly characterised.
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10
When Does Scale-Invariant Optimization Become Unstable? An Exact Schedule Law with Weight Decay
The paper derives an exact discrete‑time law that captures how learning‑rate schedules and weight decay interact in scale‑invariant neural networks, showing that a single scalar quantity governs the effective step size. It demonstrates that the balance point between contraction and expansion is intrinsically unstable, leading to recurrent dynamics when using constant learning rates with weight decay. The authors extend this analysis to various optimizers and datasets, confirming the law’s precision and showing that performance peaks sharply at the predicted boundary.